Problems of Metaphysics

Ontological Problem

Towards Historical Orientation

The starting point of all philosophical inquiry is the commonplace opinion; this applies to the development of thought both collectively and within the individual. Therefore, in a work intended to serve as an introduction to philosophy, it is prudent to adopt this as our foundational perspective.

When posed with the question of the nature of reality as such, the ordinary understanding responds primarily by pointing to visible and tangible objects: the physical world is reality. However, this perspective is, in essence, not materialistic; materialism is the product of scientific reflection. The first recognizes alongside physical bodies another kind of reality — the soul. In living bodies, there is something that is not a body, at least not in the strict sense. Indeed, no language exists that does not have a term to signify what we call the soul, thereby acknowledging the reality and essence underlying this entity. The origins of the notion of the soul as a distinct entity must be sought in the following facts. Among bodies, there exists an important and striking distinction — the distinction between living and inanimate bodies. The former move of their own volition, whereas the latter cannot move by themselves and require an external impetus. The cause of this distinction, asserts the commonplace opinion, must lie in the fact that living bodies possess something special that desires and moves, feels and senses: this is the soul.

However, the fact that this unique, autonomous essence is not merely a force or attribute leads us to another phenomenon that profoundly influences primitive thought: the phenomenon of death. With death, the living body loses its mentioned advantage over inanimate bodies: it becomes insensible and motionless. How does this happen? What occurs at this moment of death? The body remains the same as it was just a moment before; externally, it is unchanged and unimpaired, lacking only its own movement. Thus, the immediate conclusion follows: the soul, that which moves, must have departed. It must therefore be incorporeal; otherwise, the loss would have been noticeable, and it is an independent entity, as evidenced by its separation from the body and its continued existence. For the experiences of all peoples agree that the soul does not perish with death; it can still appear and act. Wherever anthropology looks, it finds the cult of the dead — a testament to the belief in the existence of the soul and its continued life after death. No one is concerned with what does not exist. Moreover, even the temporary separation of the soul from the body during life is a common conception at lower cultural levels. During sleep, the body lies motionless; yet the soul is not inactive; it sees, hears, feels, and sometimes experiences astonishing things. We say that it dreams; however, primitive understanding interprets this fact differently: the soul departs the body in sleep and wanders on its own paths, encountering precisely those things that we express as dream visions.

As for the essence of the soul according to primitive belief, it can be roughly defined as a being akin to breath, visible yet intangible, possessing the form of a body, as if it were the substantial shadow of it. The association of life with breath has evidently led to the designation of the soul as breath in numerous languages (φυχή, animus). It can thus be described as the abiding form or presence of the body without corporeality, impenetrability, and weight — a characterization that aligns with Homer’s depictions of the souls of the deceased, the portrayals by medieval artists, and the ongoing fear of ghosts. In this conception, souls are not devoid of the capacity for activities characteristic of apparitions, nor are they devoid of an internal (albeit altered and diminished) life marked by memory and feeling.

Should we attempt to classify the ontological understanding of the ordinary opinion, it would be designated as a vague dualism. Bodies constitute the genuine reality, yet alongside them exists another kind of reality — those body-like entities without true corporeality that manifest in bodies as active forces, while also existing independently as the spirits of the deceased.

Philosophical comprehension of reality is characterized everywhere, as already noted, by a tendency towards monism; the goal is to derive reality from a singular principle, to reduce the diverse forms of existence to a single archetype — this is the primary aim of philosophical thought. Its products manifest in two forms of ontological monism, depending on whether the facts of the external, visible world or the facts of the internal world are taken as starting points: materialism and spiritualism. The former asserts that bodies and movements are the primal form of reality, from which the facts of perception, thought, and will must be explained. In contrast, spiritualism or idealism posits that the facts of inner life, as they appear in self-consciousness, are the first truly existent reality; thoughts cannot be constructed as products of matter, but it is quite possible to construct matter as a product of the thinking principle; the physical world is a phenomenon.

At the dawn of Greek philosophy, we encounter both ontological theories embodied in two powerful and audacious thinkers — Democritus and Plato. The former reduces all reality to atoms and void. The smallest indivisible yet extended bodies are the primary components of reality; all natural phenomena, both celestial and terrestrial, as well as the manifestations of life including perception and thought, are explained through their movement. Conversely, Plato was the first in the West to boldly contemplate the following idea to its conclusion: bodies not only do not represent the essence of reality, but they are, in their very nature, ultimately unreal; they are manifestations of something else. The true reality is of a spiritual nature; the world, in itself, is a system of existing thoughts (ideas). In abstract thought, the spirit grasps this truly real existence, whereas sensory perception is linked with the non-existent yet arising and transient representations dispersed in space — corporeal objects and phenomena.

Aristotle, in turn, returns to the ordinary conception. In his analysis of philosophical problems, he often starts from how they are expressed in common language, and in his resolutions, he willingly reverts to the latter; he shuns sharp and one-sided thoughts, which appeal to the great solitary thinkers. His philosophy has both strong and weak aspects typical of mediating philosophy. His ontology leans towards a dualism inclined to idealism. In the beginning of the second book of his treatise on the soul, he defines its essence as the form of an organic body. This definition resembles the ordinary understanding. Its meaning is, in any case, more profound; the soul is not merely the silhouette of the body; this implies not an external, stereometric form, but an internal functional form: the active and formative principle of life. All that distinguishes a living organism from an inanimate body is the activity of the soul: growth, metabolism, spontaneous movement, sensation, attraction, thought, and rational desire. From the material components that comprise an organic body, one cannot derive its functions; the latter represent manifestations of a special vital principle: the soul; it is she who makes the body what it is. Matter provides only the potential for life, just as wood provides the potential for a bow, or marble for a statue; but it is the form that actualizes a potential statue into a reality. Thus, the soul transforms organic matter into a living body. As is evident, among these two principles, form is essential, while substance is incidental and secondary; the former represents the intrinsic "what" of a thing, the latter its "from which." Matter, in and of itself, is generally an indefinite and elusive potential; only through form does it become a definite, structured, tangible reality. In the thought of God, who is not potential but pure form, namely pure thought, matter is ultimately eliminated, although this thought is not pursued here with the same resolute seriousness as in Plato. There is no philosophy that converges more closely with ordinary opinion than this explanation of all things in terms of form and substance, of force and potential. The sharpness of Platonic idealism is so diminished in it that sound human reason can accept it. One might suggest that this connection underlies its utility for school philosophy, which has preserved it for many centuries.

The new philosophy wanders along the paths paved by the great Greek thinkers: dualism, materialism, and spiritualism constitute its returning fundamental forms.

In Descartes, it begins with the most acute sharpening of dualism: the body and the soul are two completely incomparable forms of the actual: the body is an essence whose sole definition is extension; the soul is an essence whose sole definition is thinking or consciousness. Corpus = res extensa, mens = res cogitans—these are the two definitions underlying all Cartesian philosophy.

The new conception of the body is the old one. Galileo introduced a new fundamental view into the natural sciences: motion neither arises nor disappears; just as a resting body remains at rest without external influence, so a moving body retains its motion with the same speed and direction ad infinitum. Although the Aristotelian scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages did not permit the emergence and disappearance of bodies themselves within the natural course of things, it saw no obstacle to allowing the disappearance of motion, as does common human reason: for this is evident from daily experience; in this case, it was not difficult to assume that somehow (for instance, through the activity of the soul) movement could arise initially from a state where it previously did not exist. Descartes adopts this new Galilean perspective; the quantity of motion—as he formulates it—remains constant in the world; there is neither increase nor decrease, only the transmission of motion, and that only through contact, that is, through pressure or push. Thus, he provides the axiom: all phenomena of nature without exception must be explainable through pressure and push, as must the life processes in organic bodies; physiology is the mechanics of vital phenomena. The corresponding negative formula states: the soul is not an explanatory principle in natural science; a physicist, as such, knows nothing of its existence; he would undermine his science if he began to derive nourishment, growth, or movement of the body from the soul—just as scholastic philosophy did.

The opposite side of mechanical physics and psychology is represented by a purely spiritualistic psychology. If the phenomena of bodily life cannot be explained by the activity of the soul, then the explanation of thinking from physical phenomena is certainly also impossible; motion produces motion, but it can never cause any phenomenon of consciousness; otherwise, it would have to disappear within it, that is, cease to exist physically. This contradicts the first axiom of physics. But since, on the other hand, the reality of thought cannot be doubted, and, on the contrary, is the most certain thing that exists, it is necessary to posit a principle entirely distinct from the body for it—this is spirit (mens). Thus, the new philosophy, starting from mechanical physics, begins with a sharp formulation of dualism, although it had already been forewarned by scholastic philosophy with its teaching on purely spiritual substances, which, indeed, arose from entirely different premises.

However, dualism is not the final word of the new philosophy. On the contrary, when taken to its extreme, dualism seemingly transforms into monism of its own accord. One can precisely identify the point from which the pressure leading to monism arises: this is the question of the relationship between these two kinds of reality. It remains a fact that there exist correct correlations between phenomena in the body and phenomena in the soul; arbitrary movements correspond to excitations of feeling and will, and excitations of the sensory organs correspond to sensations and perceptions. How can this relationship be conceived if, according to the principles of modern mechanics, it can no longer be thought of as interaction? The answer is provided by Spinoza: this relationship must be defined as identity. The body and the soul are not absolutely distinct; rather, they are the same thing viewed from two perspectives; the phenomenon of movement and the phenomenon of consciousness are, in essence, the same phenomenon, considered once from the outside and another time from within. This relationship runs through all of reality. Reality, forming a singular and unique essence, a single substance—whether we call it nature or God—reveals the content of its essence in two aspects: as the corporeal world (sub attributo extensionis) and as the world of consciousness (sub attributo cogitationis). From this, the fact of correct correlation without interaction becomes comprehensible: there exists a parallelism between the physical and psychological worlds, such that every state or phenomenon (modus) occurs simultaneously in both: what manifests as movement (modus extensionis) in the corporeal world appears, on the other side, in the world of consciousness as sensation or representation (idea, modus cogitationis). There is, of course, no question of interaction: both types of phenomena occur side by side, not through one another. Each of the two worlds—physical and psychological—forms a closed causal connection within itself. Moreover, this parallelism is universal: there is absolutely no phenomenon of consciousness that does not correspond to some phenomenon of motion, and conversely, there is absolutely no phenomenon of motion in nature that does not correspond to some phenomenon of consciousness. "All things," as Spinoza once expressed this conclusion, "are animated, albeit in different degrees" (omnia quamvis diversis gradibus animata). The reverse expression relevant here states: all souls are embodied.

If one surveys the development of new thought with a single overarching glance, the metaphysics delineated by Spinoza in a few concise propositions of ethics may appear as a prescient resolution of the task. Thought increasingly gravitates toward this kind of view, most clearly observed in philosophy, and recently, physiologists and biologists have also approached it, albeit often without fully clarifying all the resulting implications.

Subsequently, this will need to be developed in more detail. Here, I would like to draw attention to one more point: such a parallelistic monism can be turned in two directions: towards materialism and towards idealism. To naturalists, whose attention is directed toward the corporeal world, the first turn appears to be the most immediate. Hobbes can be regarded as their philosophical leader. Among philosophers, however, the turn towards idealism is more common. Leibniz follows this path: of course, extension and consciousness are both great forms of being; but they do not serve as expressions of the essence of reality in the same way; the spiritual world is closer to the true nature of the actual. The ultimate elements of reality, the monads, are, in themselves, beings of a spiritual nature; striving and sensation are their primary definitions, while extension is a secondary and contingent definition, a mode of manifestation rather than the true being of the actual.

Simultaneously, Berkeley was led to the same turn by the following epistemological consideration: the essence of the body can be reduced to the content of perception. This consideration, gaining increasing significance in epistemology, spreads ever more; it forms the basis of all German philosophy, starting from the time Kant compelled it to critical reflection on the nature of knowledge: the corporeal world is a form of manifestation of the same reality that reveals its true essence in the spiritual world. Here, such disparate, even hostile thinkers as Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Beneke converge. A parallelistic monism with an idealistic character—this could approximately designate the metaphysics that has dominated philosophy since that time. Alongside this, especially in the realms of natural science, there also exists a materialistic form of monism. The pure epistemologist readily remains at that point of view which Kant himself does not wish to abandon: the corporeal world and the world of consciousness are different forms of manifestation of the actual itself, the nature of which we cannot know, but can posit as one and homogeneous. This would be the perspective of agnostic monism, which Herbert Spencer also adopts.

After this historical orientation, we proceed to an examination of the problem in essence. In this, I will begin with an exposition and critique of the materialist understanding, which itself likes to present itself as the true scientific understanding, as the result of the latest natural sciences.